NORWAY AND THE WAR: BRITISH
AND GERMAN MILITARY PLANS

From the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany on 3rd
September 1939 Norway had in several ways a special importance for both
belligerents, over and above the pressure which each side naturally
sought to exercise on all accessible neutral powers. The Norwegian
coast
provided the eastern limit of the main sea route from German ports to
the Atlantic, and the control of that route was again, as in 1914-18, a
cardinal factor in the British naval blockade. Within a fortnight after
the outbreak of war the Government issued a declaration, made after
consultation with the Chiefs of Staff,[2] that a
German attack upon Norway
would meet with the same resistance as an attack on Great Britain. This
was designed to encourage Norwegian cooperation with our blockade,
which
might have an important influence in two respects. Firstly, our naval
measures, particularly those aimed against egress of enemy ships
between
Norway and the Shetlands, would be helped if the Norwegians gave a
sympathetic interpretation to their rights as neutrals under
international law. Secondly, there was the pressure to be exercised
through negotiation of trade agreements, so as to maximise the
usefulness of Norway's economic resources to ourselves and minimise it
to our enemies. By agreement dated 11th November 1939 the Norwegian
Shippers' Association chartered to Britain the largest and most modern
vessels of the Norwegian merchant fleet, which more than offset the
subsequent German-Norwegian trade agreement (23rd February 1940)
providing for exports to Germany not in excess of those for the year
1938. This involved a hole in the British blockade, but Britain forbore
to exercise any greater counter pressure upon Norwegian economic life
than the restriction of British supplies to Norway to approximately the
same level, ie that of 1937-38 (agreement of 11th March 1940).1

The general situation outlined above was complicated from the
outset by two special considerations. One was the existence of the
Leads, which enabled German ships to enter territorial waters at remote
points well inside the Arctic Circle and travel under their protection
almost as far as the entrance to the Skagerrak, where the

--9--

proxmity of German air and submarine bases made the rest
of
the voyage comparatively safe from British interception. Logically, the
matter might have been complicated further by the traditional Norwegian
claim to a wider limit for territorial waters than was accorded by
international custom elsewhere, but the Norwegian Government resolved
at
the outbreak of war not to claim privileges of neutrality beyond the
three sea miles recognised by the other Powers. As it was, the course
through the Leads gave virtually continuous protection to German
shipping—a leakage through the blockade which was of constant concern
to
the Admiralty, although it only attracted public attention on special
occasions, as when the German Atlantic liner Bremen slipped
through from Murmansk, or when the boarding of the Altmark
revealed a graver anomaly.2

The other consideration assumed an importance in the Allied
counsels which it did not perhaps altogether deserve. It was believed
from the outset of the war that Germany had two main economic
weaknesses—her dependence on oil imports, with which it would be hard
for the Allies to interfere with effectively, and her dependence upon
imports of high grade iron ore, which came partly from central Sweden
via the port of Oxelösund, but chiefly from deposits at Kiruna and
Gällivare in North Sweden. This ore reached Germany by two main
routes, from Swedish Lulea at the northern end of the Baltic and,
especially during the months from December to Aprial when Lulea was ice
bound, from the alternative railhead at the ice free port of Narvik.
The
Chiefs of Staff when consulted about Norway had placed the iron ore
supplies received via Narvik in the forefront of their argument that
access to Norwegian resources was more important to Germany than to
Britain. This opinion was supported by a statement emanating from the
formerly prominent German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who informed the
French Government from his place of refuge in Switzerland of a
momentous
report which he had once made to the German authorities showing the
Swedish iron ore to be all important.3 Thyssen credentials
as an expert in
this
matter do not appear to have been officially examined, but in answer to
an inquiry from the War Cabinet on 30th November the Ministry of
Economic Warfare gave its authority to the view that, once deprived of
its ore, Germany could not wage active war for a period exceeding
twelve
months. In 1938 Germany was believed to have imported 22 million tons
of
iron ore, 9.5 million tons of it coming from sources which the Allied
blockade had since cut off and nine million tons from Sweden, the loss
of which would therefore bring Germany down to a sixth of her prewar
importation.4

--10--

There were some unknown—or partly unknown—factors to be
taken into account, including the importance of scrap iron to the
German
steelmakers, the domestic output of low grade ore, and the amount of
stockpiling. But the high value of any stroke which would cut off the
entire Swedish supply was evident to any inquirer, so long at least as
he indulged in no speculation about the many and violent ways in which
the Germans might react to it. The value of a stroke to cut off the
supply through Narvik only, which was the most that we could make sure
of at the moment, was obviously less. The Ministry of Economic Warfare
estimated that this would produce a deficiency in German supplies of
one
million tons spread over the four winter months, which 'would certainly
mean acute industrial embarrassment'.[3] A paper
prepared by the Germany
High Command in February, showing that the Germans counted on an extra
million tons of Swedish ore in 1940 (and 10 million tons in all), gives
reasons why the fulfilment of this programme was incompatible with a
reduction from 2.5 million to one million tons of the share to be
transported via Narvik, though there is evidence from Swedish sources
that it might have been 'technically possible'.5 While these figures support
the general basis on which the Ministry of Economic Warfare was
arguing,
the German Naval Commander in Chief, Grand Admiral Raeder (for whose
use
they were compiled), did not apparently infer that the closure of the
Narvik route would be catastrophic for Germany, even if
'2,500,000-3,500,000 tons per year would be lost'.[4]

To return to the position as seen by the Allies during the winter
of 1939-40, it is clear that the existence of the route through the
Leads and its use for an essential German war import gave the Allies
strong reasons for putting Norway in the forefront of their strategical
calculations. Within a month from the outbreak of war Mr Churchill, as
First Lord of the Admiralty, had pressed the Cabinet for leave to mine
the Leads at some point north of Bergen, but at that time it was still
possible to hope that our war trade agreements with the Scandinavian
Powers might bring about a sweeping reduction in the export of Swedish
iron to Germany. In November the Cabinet decided as a long term
programme to reconstruct the Northern Barrage of antisubmarine mines
across the North Sea, which would eventually make minelaying in the
Leads necessary (as in 1918), and the Chiefs of Staff were instructed
to
report on the military factors which would be involved in stopping the
iron ore traffic from Narvik.[5] In
December, both before and after a
meeting of the Supreme War Council on the 19th,[6] at
which the Thyssen
memorandum was produced by the French, Mr Churchill pressed again for
the immediate mining of the Leads or the patrolling of the waters by
the
Royal Navy—whichever

--11--

alternative might involve less risk of an armed clash with
the Norwegians in defence of their neutrality. By this time the same
active mind had other more delicate schemes in view for bottling up
Oxelösund and, when the spring came, Lulea as well.[7] On 6th
January
this sequence of events culminated in an attempt to secure Norwegian
and
Swedish acceptance of our proposed entry into Norwegian territorial
waters by diplomatic representations, which pointed to their notorious
violations by German submarines torpedoing British ships there. But the
Cabinet was still far from being persuaded to mine the Leads without
more ado if permission were refused, as it quickly was.

Meanwhile the whole question of action in Scandinavia had been
complicated by the unprovoked attack launched by Russia against Finland
on 30th November. Its first effect was to align France and Britain with
Sweden and Norway as eager supporters of the Finns, so far as voluntary
effort and supplies of material were concerned. The Royal Air Force,
for
example, released nearly 150 from its scanty supply of aircraft for
Finnish use. It was also believed that the threat of Russian aggression
viewed with benevolence by Germany as the friend of Russia, would bring
the Scandinavian countries to interpret their neutrality in a manner
more favourable to our interests and almost to welcome our
intervention.
When the initial successes of the Finns caused the danger from Russia
to
momentarily recede, it was still hoped that the Scandinavian Powers
would so interpret their obligations as members of the League of
Nations
as to allow Allied forces to cross their territories to help the Finns
against acknowledged aggression. The result was a prolonged diplomatic
wrangle. Both Norway and Sweden were genuinely desirous of helping the
Finnish cause by all means short of their own implication in the war.
But they consistently refused to court the fate of Poland, for whose
defence the Western Powers seemed to have done absolutely nothing, by
allowing Allied forces, even in the guise of 'volunteers' to cross
their
territory into Finland, either to preserve Finnish independence, or for
their own protection against a hypothetical Russian (or German) advance
directed to the Swedish orefields or the warm water ports of northern
Norway.

The Allies for their part, while sincere in protesting their
desire to save Finland, certainly had other objects in view to which
they gave less publicity—objects so important that the original scheme
for a naval operation against the Narvik traffic was for the time being
virtually abandoned lest it might prejudice the larger hope. The French
wanted the establishment of a Scandinavian field of operations almost
as
an end in itself, and were prepared to run the risks of establishing a
naval blockade against Russian supplies shipped to north Finland from
Murmansk or of trying to wrest Petsamo, the Finnish Arctic port, from
Russian hands rather than forgo the chance

--12--

to keep the main action of the war away from the
Franco-German front. The plans, however, which the British sponsored[8]
were less widely open to criticism than the Petsamo project, which
seemed to combine the maximum provocation to the Russians with the
minimum of strategic advantage to ourselves. Accordingly, what was
approved by the Supreme War Council at its first meeting of the year
1940 on 5th February was a British scheme, which contemplated the
provision of two or more Allied brigades on the Finnish front, but laid
its chief emphasis elsewhere. This was timed for action by mid-March.

On its way to rescue the Finns the main striking force was to land
at Narvik and advance along the railway to Kiruna and Gällivare,
the two centres of the North Swedish orefield, and on to the Baltic
port
of Lulea; it was hoped to establish the equivalent of two Allied
brigades along this line before the latter part of April, when weather
conditions would normally open the Baltic to German seaborne
expeditions
and also facilitate a German advance overland through Sweden. A second
force of five British Territorial battalions was to occupy three ports
in southern Norway, so as to provide us with bases for the general
defence of Scandinavia (and an alternative route to Finland) and to
deny
those bases to the Germans. Trondheim (with Namsos) would be the
principal Allied base, Bergen an important subsidiary base and the
terminal point of our northern mine barrage; Stavanger, on the other
hand, would probably not be occupied longer than was necessary to
demolish the airfield, which is the nearest on the Continent to Scapa
Flow. Two British divisions were held back from France for these
immediate tasks. But the plan also provided for much larger forces,
drawn from both French and British sources, to be passed through
Trondheim for an eventual campaign in southern Sweden. The British
would
in the end put about 100,000 men in the field, the French perhaps
50,000. Forty destroyers would be needed for close escort duty, besides
making the protection of the convoys the main preoccupation of the Home
Fleet. The air component totalled six and a half squadrons of aircraft,
including three of fighters and four squadrons of home based heavy
bombers would also be employed. These are for that period of the war
big
figures, but not extravagantly so, if the Chiefs of Staff were right to
call the scheme our 'first and best chance of wresting the initiative
and...shortening the war'.[9]

On 16th February a new turn was given to the situation when the
destroyer Cossack was sent to Jössingfjord, south of
Stavenger, in order that a boarding party might rescue 299 British
merchant seamen incarcerated in the German auxiliary warship Altmark,
to which they had been transferred from the pocket battleship Graf
Spee before the latter was caught by the Royal Navy off the River
Plate early in

--13--

December. The Norwegian Government complained bitterly of
the infringement of territorial waters by our ships; the British
Government found in this startling revelation of the misuse of these
waters for German military purposes, which the Norwegians had shown
themselves powerless to prevent, an additional justification for the
long considered action against the Narvik iron ore traffic. It was very
nearly touched off, but at the last moment postponed again in favour of
the larger plan.

For this the French Prime Minister, M Daladier, desired une
opération brusquée,6 but the British did not. The Chiefs of
Staff canvassed the pro's and con's of rushing our 'volunteers for
Finland' ashore at Narvik and perhaps the southern ports in the hope
that Norwegian opinion might accept or even welcome a fait accompli.
But it was not until the eleventh hour or later, namely at 6:30pm on
12th March, three days after the Finns were known in London to be
negotiating for terms with the Russians, that instructions to
commanders
for action along these lines received Cabinet approval—and even then
the
execution of our plans still presupposed some degree of acquiescence,
at
least on the part of the Norwegian and Swedish Governments. This had
not
been secured when the Finnish surrender, announced on the night of
12th/13th, put an end to the only argument which had any chance of
persuading the Scandinavian Governments or peoples to hazard their
neutrality.

On 14th March the British War Cabinet decided, with the reluctant
assent of the French, that in the altered circumstances our plans would
meet with positive resistance from Norway and Sweden and might drive
them into the arms of Germany.[10] The War
Office stood down the three
forces which had been got ready, and the 5th Scots Guards, a volunteer
battalion of skiers trained at Chamonix,[11] was
actually disbanded. But a
change of government in France, which brought M Reynaud into power on
21st March as the champion of a more aggressive policy, renewed the
demand for action. It was now decided to start by solving the original
problem of the passage of the iron ore south from Narvik by the
original
method, namely, the mining of the Leads so as to drive enemy shipping
out of Norwegian territorial waters. This operation, christened
'Wilfred' by Mr Churchill as being 'minor and innocent'7, nevertheless required some
justification in the eyes of the world for the breach of neutral rights
which it would undoubtedly involve. The Altmark episode having
been allowed to fade into the past, a more formal procedure was now to
be adopted. Norway and Sweden were to be warned that their conduct as
neutrals worked out in practice to the advantage of Germany; that this
was the more intolerable because Germany in

--14--

principle was the enemy of the independence and rights of
small Powers, of which the Allies were the champions; and that in
consequence the Allies reserved the right to take the appropriate
action. This was to be followed by the laying of minefields in
Norwegian
waters, of which no previous warning would be given to the Norwegian
Government. This in turn, it was supposed, might be followed by German
counteraction against Norwegian territory; and this, by the acceptance
by Norway of an Allied occupation of Narvik and the three southern
ports, for which troops (but no aircraft ) would be held in readiness.
Expectations about Sweden were less clear, but it was hoped that
circumstances would enable the force landed at Narvik to reach the
orefields as the champions of Sweden against aggression, actual or
hypothetical. Once established in the far north, we had a further
scheme
for blocking Lulea harbour with mines laid from the air

In detail, Operation Wilfred and the associated military Plan R.4
involved, firstly, the laying of two minefields, in the approaches to
the Vestfjord, north of Bodo, so as to close the passage south from
Narvik, and off Stadland (between Aalesund and Bergen), with the
pretended laying of a third near Molde. This operation, though not
previously announced to the Norwegian Government, entailed the double
risk of Norwegian counteraction in defence of neutrality and of action
by German warships which fortune or foresight might bring into the
vicinity. The plan therefore involved as its second feature the
disposition of units of the Home Fleet so as to protect the minelaying.
There would be a small covering force to consist of one cruiser and two
destroyers. Two other cruisers and three destroyers at Rosyth and—at
longer notice—three more cruisers from Scapa were to be available as a
striking force against any German sortie that might result. Thirdly,
the
plan provided for a military expedition to take immediate advantage of
the somewhat vaguely defined moment when 'the Germans set foot on
Norwegian soil, or there is clear evidence that they intend to do so'.[12]
Narvik and its railway as far as the Swedish frontier formed the
primary
objective. To this port there was assigned a force of one infantry
brigade with one light antiaircraft battery, of which the first
battalion was to set sail in a transport escorted by two cruisers a few
hours after the mines were laid. The forces to occupy Bergen and
Trondheim and to raid Stavanger were on a smaller scale, totalling five
battalions plus technical troops,[13] but the timing
of
the operations
would
have sent them from their embarkation port on the same day as the
Narvik
expedition and, as the four battalions for Stavanger and Bergen were to
be sent in cruisers, there was a reasonable supposition that they could
forestall a German landing. The Trondheim battalion would reach the
Norwegian coast two days later.

--15--

It was intended to make Narvik into a regular base, with
local defence forces and fuel supplies. The Allied strength there was
to
be built up from French sources to a total of 18,000 men, and there was
even the prospect of air support (one fighter squadron and one army
cooperation flight) in the event of a move on Gällivare. The
battalions at Bergen and Trondheim would be less fortunate. Not only
were they left without any prospect of air support (though so much
nearer the German bases), but on the ground they depended for their
buildup upon the hope that the two battalions at Stavanger might
succeed
in rejoining them, if the latter were attacked by superior German
forces, and the intended provision at a date unspecified of 'such
reinforcements as may prove necessary...in the face of German action'.[14]
Lastly, it should be noticed that each of these expeditions was to be
'organised and equipped on as light a scale as possible'[15] and was
envisaged as landing in a friendly port or at worst in the face of
sporadic, temporary resistance from misguided Norwegians, not Germans—a
limited scope which in the sequel was all too quickly forgotten or
ignored.

The ideas which found expression in the German plan Weserübung
can be traced back to controversies regarding German naval strategy in
the First World War, in which the views of Admiral Wegener played a
leading part.[16]
His
book Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges,
published in 1929, was well known in naval circles in Britain and
America, and even Norway, with its study of the implications of
Germany's geographical situation and its insistence that the main
function of a navy is to open and maintain access to ocean trade
routes.
This had not been achieved by defending 'the dead angle of a dead sea'
(the German North Sea ports languishing under the effects of a British
blockade) and would not in the Admiral's opinion have been achieved
even
if the German navy had successfully occupied the coast of Denmark.

The Norwegian position was certainly preferable.
England
could then no longer maintain the blockade line from the Shetlands to
Norway but must withdraw approximately to the line of the Shetlands—the
Faeroes—Iceland. But this line was a net with very wide meshes. The
fresh wind from the ocean then already blew from afar into the stifling
atmosphere of the hunger blockade. Moreover, this line was hard for
England to defend: for in the first place it lay comparatively near to
our bases; but above all, as the map shows, we should considerably
outflank the English strategic position to the north.8

Although the pressure of the British naval blockade in the first
winter

--16--

of the Second World War was far from reconstituting the
hunger blockade of Admiral Wegener's argument, his general theory at
least prepared the way; it is even alleged that Hitler treated
Wegener's
writings as his 'naval bible'.9 Grand Admiral Raeder, the earliest
advocate among German war leaders of aggression against Norway, first
laid the matter before the Führer on 10th October 1939, when the
latter promised consideration of his suggestion of 'how important it
would be for submarine warfare to obtain bases on the Norwegian coast,
eg Trondheim, with the help of Russian pressure'.[17] Almost two
months
later Raeder returned to the attack on a different score, pointing out
that a German occupation of Norway was the only effective way of
blocking the trade routes from Norway to England, because they started
from so many scattered points on the Norwegian coast, and conversely,
that a British occupation would endanger the control of the Baltic, on
which German naval warfare essentially depended,

At this juncture the strategic was fortified by the political
argument, when Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the tiny 'National Union'
party in Norway was brought before Hitler by Raeder and Rosenberg, the
expert on Nazism for export, as the leader of a promising national
socialist movement which would facilitate a bloodless invasion of his
country. This caused the operation, as conceived and authorised by
Hitler, to be based at the outset on the two alternative hypotheses:
that it might be carried out by peaceful methods, with German forces
entering Norway at the invitation of a Norwegian Government, real or
sham, or by an invasion without such pretext. In the end, German
confidence in Quisling's proposals was so small that he was not
informed
of the German military plans in time for him to take any advance
measures of cooperation before the landings: the German military
authorities let him into the secret at Copenhagen on 4th April, only
five days before the invasion, when he furnished some mistaken
intelligence about the gun defences of Narvik in return.10 Nevertheless, he has
double importance in relation to Weserübung, because he
held out the prospect of cooperation by treacherous Norwegians, which
made the plan seem less foolhardy, and also because he directly
influenced Hitler to favour such a plan by his allegations that British
intervention in Norway was imminent. On the whole, it appears that
Hitler himself regarded the occupation of Norway primarily as a
preventive measure and that, although instructions to make a plan date
from Hitler's first meeting with Quisling on 14th December, the
effective decision to implement it resulted from the Altmark
episode of 16th February, which showed

--17--

that in certain circumstances Britain was ready to
infringe
Norwegian neutrality.11
Meanwhile Quisling's accomplice, Hagelin, a Norwegian long resident in
Berlin who was conveniently engaged in selling German antiaircraft guns
and coal in Norway, was assiduous in providing reports of British
military preparations arising out of the Finnish campaign.

A study for a possible operation against Norway and Denmark was
accordingly authorised on 14th December: it was to be made by officers
of the three services under the auspices of the Supreme Command of the
Armed Forces (OKW). An order of 27th January 1940, signed by General
Keitel, marks the transition from theoretical consideration of the
project as 'Study North' to detailed preparation of Weserübung
(Weser Exercise) by a planning staff which was to be the nucleus of a
future operational staff. The Chief Planning Officer was Captain
Krancke, who worked to a large extent under Hitler's personal
supervision, and from 21st February the project took final shape with
the appointment of a commander. This was General von Falkenhorst,[18] who
had been suggested by Keitel; he had served as Chief of Staff to von
der
Goltz when the Germans intervened in Finland in 1918. Hitler's order to
complete arrangements for the execution of the plan was signed on 1st
March and included a definition of its strategic aims. 'This operation
will prevent British encroachment in Scandinavia and the Baltic;
further, it will guarantee our ore base in Sweden and give our navy and
air force a wider startline against Britain.'12 From this date the only
matter still left for decision was the actual timing of the operation
and its official pretext.

By this stage the plan used separate names for the two aggressions
against Norway and against Denmark, the latter being designed chiefly
to
make the attack on Norway easier, but it will be convenient to use the
term Weserübung throughout for the Norwegian operation,
properly known as Weserübung Nord. The success of the plan
must not blind us to the difficulties under which it
laboured—difficulties arising from personal jealousies of both the Army
and the Air Force (including Göring) against a plan sponsored by
the Navy; difficulties arising from its superimposition upon the main
plan for the attack in the west, which had been postponed from November
to the spring; and difficulties arising from the naval odds. These
weighed so heavily against Germany that Raeder himself at a conference
with Hitler on 12th December entered the caveat that the German
Navy could not yet 'cope for any length of time' with severe surface
warfare off the Norwegian coast.[19]Weserübung
had therefore
to
be based essentially on secrecy, speed and deception—secrecy of
preparation,

--18--

speed of execution, and deception as to the objective. In
view of these considerations the number of troops to be employed was
kept to a minimum and General von Falkenhorst was debarred from
occupying certain minor ports, including Namsos and Aandalsnes. But the
occupation of Oslo, the capital, Kristiansand on the south coast;
Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim, the principal west coast ports; and
Narvik in the north—which was considered to be the minimum for holding
the country and excluding the British—was judged to require a force of
six divisions. Therefore the essence of the plan was to find a means of
conveying and landing the six divisions which would meet the requisite
conditions, particularly those of secrecy and speed.

The plan was accordingly based in the first instance on finding an
alternative for the orthodox method of transporting a military
expedition overseas. Six divisions would normally have required more
than half a million tons of transports protected by warships,
constituting an armada which Germany could not in fact have mustered in
full strength, and which would in any case have clearly advertised its
intentions to the British and Norwegians long before it could have
reached Norwegian waters at transport speed. Instead, the Germans
decided to embark their first echelon of 8,850 men in warships; these
would move fast and would not proclaim their destination, but would, of
course, be seriously handicapped by their load in the event of a naval
engagement. Moreover, this decision involved the use, for conveyance or
protection, of the entire German fleet. But the warships could not
carry
the equipment, so by an elaborate and carefully timed series of
operations slower moving merchant vessels were to go on ahead—one group
of seven steamers figuring as normal traffic for Murmansk, others
travelling singly and trusting to luck to escape investigation. Some
would lie in Norwegian harbours as coal ships, awaiting der Tag;
all were to be at their port of destination in the course of the first
day. The equipment force, as we may call it, carried also a small
additional provision of troops, but the first serious reinforcements
were not due until the third and fifth days of the invasion. These
would
be directed to Oslo only and redistributed thence by land or air (or
possibly by sea) as occasion served. Thus very small initial forces
were
expected to take their separate objectives by surprise; some equipment
would quickly be made available and they were then to hold on pending
reinforcement. There was to be an immediate turn round of the shipping
used, and all warships —with the exception of two destroyers, which
Hitler decided to retain for harbour defence at Trondheim—were to try
to
get home to German waters as quickly as possible, those from Bergen and
farther south slipping back along the coast, those from the two
northern
ports attempting a combined breakthrough. It was however

--19--

assumed that in the Skagerrak area British countermeasures
would not prevent the passage of reinforcements northwards continuing
over a period of several weeks.

Finally, we may notice that the naval plan included elaborate
arrangements for using, or rather abusing, the British flag, names of
British warships, and communication in English so as momentarily to
confuse the issue if the invaders were challenged at Norwegian
harbours.
For that moment of penetrating the harbour defences was foreseen as
being in all probability the crisis of the whole expedition, the more
so
as the latest Intelligence reports from Norway suggested an increase of
alertness on the part of the naval authorities.[20] But with or
without
deception, the plan assumed, on much the same arguments as had brought
Hitler triumphantly through Munich and other crises, that the
Government
of a peaceloving people would sooner let the moment for action pass
than
risk the charge of precipitating total war.

The 10th Air Corps at Hamburg was to support the attack on Norway
and Denmark with a force of 1,212 aircraft (1,008 immediately
serviceable).[21]
Rather more than one half of these were transports used
by
Germany's civil airlines before the war, which would drop paratroops to
seize the big airfield at Stavanger (Sola) and the main Oslo airfield
of
Fornebu and would subsequently be used to fly in airborne troops and
the
more urgent supplies. There would be a hundred fighters to deal with
Norwegian air units, which it was hoped to catch on the ground, and
later with the expected intervention of the Royal Air Force, and about
four hundred long range bombers would be available to support the
German
landings from the sea and to engage British naval forces on their
approach to Norwegian waters. They had also a more general task, to
induce the submission of Government and people by the threat of
devastation which their mere appearance in Norwegian skies would convey.

Gruppe XXI, the force placed at the disposal of von
Falkenhorst had been formed by the army authorities under orders which
specified the employment of first class troops. Of the six divisions,
however, only one had been in action before, namely the 3rd Mountain
Division, and its experience in Poland amounted to very little because
it was not motorised and in that quick moving campaign usually arrived
too late. General Dietl, who commanded it, was a personal friend of
Hitler and a mountain expert—he had even attended winter manoeuvres in
Norway before the war. It seems probable that these mountain troops
with
their special training and equipment, first embodied as a division
under
the same leader at Graz in 1938, were set aside for Narvik in the
expectation of a spectacular success. The other five divisions received
no special training or equipment, and for security reasons only their
commanding

--20--

officers were given any advance information about the
intended campaign.

The history of British and German planning for the eventuality of
war in Norway makes two things clear. One is that the Germans enjoyed
an
enormous advantage because the carrying out of their plan did not
depend
upon Norwegian goodwill, whereas the Allied military advisers had
considered and rejected in advance the idea of forcing an entry into
Norway in the face of positive resistance by Government or people. But
the advantage which the Germans enjoyed through their consistent
disregard for neutral rights was liable to be cancelled out if Britain
took the first step; and her control of the seas made it possible at
any
time by mining or similar action to deny to the Germans the use of
territorial waters. The timing of operations in fact largely determined
their immediate outcome.

The main considerations for both sides were the established facts
of climate and weather, the general political situation, and what was
known or guessed as to enemy intentions. Neither side would have chosen
to fight in Norway under winter conditions; but the British had hoped
originally to enter Norway with a sufficient margin of time for their
forces to be in a position to defend Lulea by the second half of April,
when the breakup of the ice in the northern part of the Baltic might
make a German seaborne attack on that port possible.13 For the Germans, on the
other hand, a limit was set by the period of generally low visibility,
frequent storms, and long nights, needed to give the German ships a
reasonable chance of reaching Trondheim and still more Narvik without
interception. Politically, as we have seen, Allied hopes were for a
long
time tied up with the Finnish campaign, which might enable forces sent
to defend Finland under the general auspices of the League Covenant to
get a footing in Scandinavia. After the Finnish surrender, the Allies
had to consider instead how to present their general argument, to the
effect that the Norwegian interpretation of neutral rights conferred an
unreasonable advantage upon Germany, in such a way as to conciliate
American and other neutral opinion. As for Germany, Jodl's diary
describes Hitler on 13th March 1940 as 'still looking for some
justification' for Weserübung,14, but as no new excuse was
found during the succeeding month, it is probably more realistic to
suppose that in its political aspect the important decision was that
taken on 3rd March, when after a good many changes of plan the attack
on
Scandinavia was given precedence over the attack on the Low Countries.

--21--

The part played on either side by knowledge of enemy
intentions is more difficult to determine, because the period of the
so-called 'phoney war' was one in which Europe seethed with rumours of
plans and counterplans, making it almost impossible for Governments to
separate truth from fiction, still more to base action upon
appreciation. Thus the British Foreign Office noted as early as 19th
October 1939 an unsupported rumour of an impending partition of
Scandinavia between Germany and Russia. Then on 8th January 1940 the
Foreign Secretary inform the War Cabinet of a secret report, dated 29th
December, that the Germans were ready to act in southern Scandinavia.
On
3rd February, we find the War Cabinet examining a circumstantial report
despatched by our military attaché from Stockholm on 20th
January: a neutral colleague had explained to him in some detail plans
to secure the Narvik–Lulea railway route and subsequently to occupy
both
southern Sweden and southern Norway, on which the Germans were said to
me now actively engaged. On 26th March, the British Minister in
Stockholm reported the concentration of German aircraft and shipping,
possibly for the seizure of Norwegian airfields and ports, as
information obtained from a Swedish officer which was, corroborated by
other news of shipping massed at Kiel. On the 30th the French Admiral
Darlan, desiring authority to requisition merchant ships so as to put
the French expeditionary force for Norway at one week's notice for
embarkation, argued that 'Recent information shows that Germany has
collected the means for an expedition against the bases in South
Norway,
Stavanger, or Sweden: it is not unreasonable to imagine that she will
react on the morrow of our diplomatic démarche or of
the
minelaying'.15
His letter, addressed to Daladier and General Gamelin, does not
indicate
the sources on which he relied in his appreciation, but reports of
various kinds were by now fairly widespread; the possibility that they
'might portend an invasion of Scandinavia' was put, for instance, to
the
British Chiefs of Staff at their meeting on the morning of 3rd April.[22]
The final preparations for a large-scale expedition could not be wholly
concealed from neutral eyes, and it has been suggested that Admiral
Canaris, head of the German Intelligence Service, and other highly
placed officers who opposed Hitler were deliberately indiscreet.16 The
most
circumstantial, and in retrospect the most interesting, report was one
received through a neutral Minister in Copenhagen on 6th April, to the
effect that a division conveyed in ten ships was due to land at Narvik
on the night of the 8th. It was not for a moment believed that the
Germans could anticipate us so far north; but by this time special
arrangements had been worked out between the Cabinet and the

--22--

Chiefs of Staff to avoid any last-minute hitch in
authorising our expeditions to sail at once, when the moment came,
because the Germans might forestall us at Stavanger or possibly involve
us in a race for Bergen or even Trondheim.[23]

The Germans knew less of Allied plans; there was less to know.
But, as we have seen, the fear that the other side might get their blow
in first was strongly Hitler's mind at least from the time of his
interview with Quisling in December. It would not require much in the
way of secret military intelligence to inflame his fears: even before
the Altmark episode the speeches of the First Lord of the
Admiralty implied that German misuse of Norwegian territorial waters
would not be tolerated for ever, and the manoeuvres in which the Allies
engaged in order to secure an official Finnish appeal for their help
were precisely the kind of stratagem of which Hitler would be quick to
detect the earliest traces. Thus on 30th December his naval conference
was considering the 'danger that volunteers from Britain, in disguise,
will carry out an unobtrusive occupation of Norway'.[24] As for specific
operations, according to information which reached the British War
Cabinet on 20th February, French officials in Stockholm were then
talking openly of an expedition to Narvik,[25] and a fortnight
later the
details of proposed arrangements for securing Norwegian ports seemed to
be more or less public property in the same capital, which was
notoriously honeycombed with German espionage. The German naval staff
at
this juncture had even listed the countermeasures, including invasion
of
South Norway, to be taken 'on receipt of the first intelligence of any
British landing in northern or Western Norway'[26]—an event which
up to
the
time of the Russo-Finnish peace treaty was considered imminent. But
Admiral Raeder's final forecast, given to the Führer on 26th
March,
was that Britain was more likely to strike first at Germany's trade in
neutral waters, in hopes of the German reaction which would occasion a
British landing.[27]

The German operation Weserübung was framed
originally so as to be ready on 20th March. The British plan, accepted
by the Supreme War Council on 28th March, was to come into effect with
the minelaying on 5th April, as a sequel to the dispatch of
justificatory Notes to the Scandinavian powers on 1st or 2nd April.
This
meant that the Germans would have got their blow in first and the world
might never have heard of the mining operations; but the persistence of
ice in the Baltic and the Great Belt caused a German postponement and
it
was not until 2nd April that Hitler, after reference to the period of
moonless nights—the new moon was on 7th April—finally decided upon 9th
April. This would have given the Allies are small margin of time after
their minelaying, in which the West Coast of Norway could have been
occupy with Norwegian agreement according to plan,

--23--

if—and it is a big 'if'—the immediate German reaction had
been sufficient to warrant, but insufficient to impede, our
intervention. But at the meeting of the supreme war Council the
decision
to initiate the action in Norway had been linked, with the consent of
the French Prime Minister, to the initiation of another action—the
sowing of fluvial mines in order to disrupt traffic along the Rhine.
The
British authorities had long been pressing for this operation (which
the
French opposed as being likely to provoke German air attacks) and we
believed that its novelty and boldness might distract American
attention
from the possible illegality of our intended action off the Norwegian
coast. The French War Committee, under the influence of M Daladier, now
in effect went back on the agreement, and this caused a three-day
postponement of the Norway plan for fruitless expostulation. The Notes
therefore were not delivered in Stockholm and Oslo until 7 PM on the
5th, by which time a newspaper agitation about our supposed intentions
had developed in the two capitals; the actual minelaying was due to
follow on the 8th.

Thus it came about that the naval forces are both sides were in
motion simultaneously for the execution of their respective plans, some
of the Germans having started from their more distant bases a little
earlier. But the German plan provided for landing operations
unconditionally at all points at 4:15 am on 9th April, whereas the
British plan provided for a succession of conditional landings, which
would only take place if evidence of a suitably hostile German reaction
to the minelaying were available immediately, and in that event would
follow it out an interval ranging from one to four and a half days.
Even
then, the British landings were to be further conditioned by our
ability, through diplomatic pressure at the centre and local liaison,
to
avoid serious and active resistance by the Norwegians. In point of
fact,
there would have been token resistance and consequent delays.